The Back of a Storm
by Rahmi
Summary: Timestamps for the Secure the Blessing universe.


_These are derived from prompts left on my livejournal. As such, there will probably be more at some unspecified point in the future. Feel free to leave prompts in a review, if you'd like, but I make no promises on filling them. Title from the song "Buffalo" by Kathleen Edwards._

**Dean's an awesome big brother, but only to Sam.**

Sam stumbles downstairs a week after everything's gone down feeling like death warmed over. There'd been visions somewhere in the middle of the night; he has time before they happen, but his head and stomach are still revolting.

"Dude," Dean says. "Sit down and eat. You look like a famine victim."

Sam rolls his eyes and looks at his plate. He's not actually hungry, contrary to everything people have ever said about teenage boys, and the idea of eating bacon and eggs is making his stomach turn. "I don't want anything this heavy," he finally says under his breath.

Mary's cooking. John's already digging into his food and Dean has bits of egg stuck next to his mouth. He really doesn't want to piss anybody off over food.

Dean taps the tines of his fork against his plate. "You want somethin' else?" he asks. "I could go for some oatmeal. Nice and bland." He waggles his eyebrows and Sam finds himself cracking a smile. Jesus. His brother.

"Dean," Mary says, "Don't you think that _I_ should be the one making that offer?" She has her hands on her hips when Sam looks over, the spatula jutting out to the side; her mouth is kind of twisted, like she doesn't know what to do with them.

He ducks his head.

"No," Dean says, "You've got everyone else. I've got Sammy."

"I want oatmeal," Abby says.

"Get it yourself," Dean says instantly, and turns to nudge Sam in the belly. "So, c'mon, a little gruel to start your day? Remember when you used to put your bowl on your head when you were done? It was cute. Messy, but cute."

Sam remembers sitting in baths after breakfast while Dean grumbled and scrubbed his head with shampoo. Obviously, Mary and John have no such memories, so he ducks his head to avoid their stares and shares a small sideways smile with Dean.

"Dad hated that," Dean murmurs. He's grinning when he gets up and punches Sam's shoulder on his way to the pantry. "Instant or slow-cooked, dude? One time offer, you know how I feel about," he shudders, "Cooking."

Sam leans his chin on one hand and rubs at his eyes with the other. "Whichever," he mutters.

"Slow it is."

"Dean," Mary says, "Make enough for your sister if you're going to make oatmeal."

Abby slams her chair back. "I don't want any," she says, stomping off.

Dean blinks. "Something I said?"

**Mary has two sons and doesn't know either.**

Mary wakes up in the middle of the night because the lights are flickering. She always wakes up when the lights flicker; it's leftover from when she was small and a ghost lived in her closet for two weeks before Daddy killed it.

She runs a hand down her face and puts her feet on the cold floor. "Going to check the fusebox," she tells John. He grunts, so she shakes her head fondly and shuffles out of the room.

There's mumbling coming from Dean's room. Mary stops and leans her head against the doorframe.

"You wanna talk about it?" Dean's voice says.

"No."

"Tough."

"Lollipops and candy-canes, Dean."

"That didn't work the first, second, or millionth time you tried that, dude. If you were dreaming about candy-canes, you'd have been makin' sucking noises or something in your sleep."

Mary shakes her head and scratches the back of her calf with one foot. Her son and his brother. She grew up int he hunting world and this still makes her head hurt. A boy that isn't hers, except for all the ways that he is.

There's a rustle in the bedroom that has Mary standing up straight, suddenly aware that she's eavesdropping. Then she relaxes. They're not... sleeping together. Not like that. She has no reason to be blushing.

"Seriously," Dean says. "You looked like shit this morning, and you're not sleeping now. Spill."

"Visions. Nightmares. Take your pick." Sam sounds weary. "There's no Azazel here, but I still dream about Jess burning."

A longer silence. "Come on," Dean suddenly says.

Mary scrambles back away from the door in an undignified hurry when it opens and Dean blinks at her. "The lights," she says unconvincingly, pointing at where the hallway light is burning a low, cheerful orange.

Dean's eyes flicker. "Sammy had a bad dream."

"I'm not five, Dean."

"Shut your mouth, you whiny bitch," Dean says. He grabs Sam's shoulder when the kid stumbles and then offers Mary a bright, false smile. "We're gonna watch some tv, maybe have a few beers."

"Sam's underage," Mary points out quietly.

"He can have chocolate milk. He loves it like you wouldn't believe."

"I'm not _five_, Dean!"

"Once again, shut your mouth, bitch." Sam slaps the back of his head; Dean turns to point a finger at him in warning while Mary covers her mouth to hide a smile. "You know you want to give yourself a milk moustache."

They're such _brothers_, for all that Sam... isn't hers. Her smile fades. She steps back and lets them pass her, watches the way Dean hovers a little behind Sam, rambling quietly about a shared past that Mary isn't a part of.

She changed her son's diapers. Why does she feel like she doesn't know him at all?

**Having two brothers can be a pain in the ass.**

"No, Dean," Sam says.

Abby looks up from her books (stupid college) in time to see Dean's face fall. She wrinkles her nose. "What'd he do this time?" she asks.

"I am being an awesome big brother."

"He's being a pain in the ass. What're you working on?" Sam throws himself down on the couch next to her; Abby self-consciously pulls her feet back towards herself. Sam's still really cute, even if he is her almost brother, and it's _weird._

"Spanish," she finally manages to get out. "Conjugating verbs."

"That's not so bad," Sam says. He scratches at the back of his head, then kicks Dean when he wanders over and gives him a warning look. "You should try Latin. Or Greek. That was pretty bad."

"He's not mentioning the French, Sumerian cuneiform, or the Spanish." Dean squishes onto the couch between the two of them. Abby has no problems with shoving her bare feet under _his_ thigh.

Sam shrugs apologetically. "I'm not very good at Spanish. It's been a while since high school."

"I don't need any help," Abby says immediately. She's got two months left until she graduates; even if she fails this next test, she's _still_going to college. Somewhere far away from her freakshow family. "Did you even graduate?"

"No," Sam says, ducking his head. Abby catches the mostion from the other side of Dean. "I didn't even finish sixth grade this time around. Too much to do."

Dean turns to pin her with a look that makes all the hair on her neck stand up. Her brother isn't going to hurt her. Sometimes, though, she can't make herself believe it. He should look at _other people_ like that, about her, not about this stupid not brother of theirs.

"Still the smartest sasquatch you'll ever meet, Gayle," Dean says quietly, and then he turns his head, dismissively, and says, "So, Sammy. Patricia Steward. Boobs out to _here_, man, and an ass that you can bounce a quarter off of. What'd you say?"

"I say that if she's interested in me, she's too young." Sam sounds amused, though.

Abby wrinkles her nose. "Patty's on her back for the soccer team all the time," she says into her book, "You don't wanna know what you'll catch from her."

"Yeah, sounds like one of Dean's."

"I have awesome taste in women, shut the hell up."

"If you want _STDs_, sure."

"Which one of us had the clap again?"

Sam's lip curls. "Which one of us got cursed with a month of russian roulette STDs?"

"Hey!" Dean turns to jostle Sam, almost making Abby stab herself with her pen in the process. It's just as well. She's been boggling; she needs to do homework. She does not need to think about the sex ed diagrams she saw dealing with gonorrhea.

"Dude, that was low. We agreed never to bring that shit up again."

Abby slams her book shut before Sam can say anything. She gathers up her homework, works her feet out from under Dean, and heads to the kitchen table. Mom might sing while she planned out dinner, but at least she didn't argue about sexually transmitted diseases.

"What crawled up her ass?"

"Dean!"

She really, really hates them.

**Having a sister can be a pain in the ass.**

"Did you score and forget to tell me?" Dean demands. He holds a bra aloft when Sam's head pops out of the bathroom like a messed up gopher or something and grins his most obnoxious smile. "Hell, I'm proud of you. Took you long enough."

Sam this time around is a virgin. It offends Dean on so many levels. He needs to get laid. Stat.

"Ugh," Sam says around his toothbrush. "Nuh." He leans back into the bathroom and Dean hears him spit a few times. "Dude, you're gonna wanna put that down."

Dean gives the bra a dubious look. "Why? Did she have some kind of groddy skin rash or something?"

"I haven't slept with anyone, Dean," Sam says. There's a sound like he just saw what Dean did to the mouthwash, this kind of disgusted half snort that makes Dean smirk, then Sam says, "Mom did our laundry, remember?"

"Yeah, so?"

"So, I haven't slept with anyone." Sam walks out of the bathroom and gives the bra a freaked out look. "Don't make me paint you a picture, man. Just put it back."

It takes a couple of seconds to process that. It's bigger than Mom, which he is all kinds of skeeved out to realize he knows, so it's not like it could be _hers_, and then he realizes that there's really only one person in the house that would wear a bright pink bra. Then? Then he's forced to hurl it to the ground and make horrendously girlie noises of disgust while Sam laughs at him.

The bra levitates itself into a plastic bag Sam is holding at arm's length with a pinched look on his face. Dean knows the feeling.

"I touched it," he says in a small, horrified voice. "Sammy, it's been on my sister's _tits_ and I _touched it_."

Sam knots the plastic bag and gingerly stuffs it into a side of the duffel bag. "You touch my underwear all the time," Sam finally says. He sounds shell-shocked, too, though; Dean's glad he's not alone in this.

"That's _different!_" Dean paces away from the bag with his sister's _bra_ in it, giving it a distrustful look as he goes. "You're a dude! I mean, I may joke about you being a girl, but I know you have a dick!"

"You have such weird hangups about your siblings," Sam says.

"Don't you dare pretend you're not freaked the fuck out too."

**John sees that Dean loves Sam and Sam loves Dean and they both love the family except the boys always come first for each other.**

"Your sister's birthday's comin' up," John says. He tucks the phone into the crook of his neck and flips the meat to marinate the other side.

There's a long pause on the phone. John listens to furious whispers on the other side of the line as he pokes at the chicken. It needs a few more hours, still, but he's hungry now. Might not be worth waitin' all that long for.

"I know," Dean says finally. "Me'n Sam'll be in town around the eighth."

"Good," John says, at a loss. "You sure you don't wanna come a little earlier? Abby wants to throw some kind of party on the Friday before. Just come down and make a week of it with us."

Another silence, then, "Sam's birthday's on the second," Dean says reproachfully. "I'm not gonna make him sit around there where it's all gonna be about Abby's nineteenth."

John purses his lips so he doesn't say that Sam had already been nineteen once and didn't _need_ everyone to make a big deal about it. Abby's coming home from college for them, the least Dean can do is show up and be _her _brother for a week, instead of always putting her on the backburner for Sam.

It's his turn for loaded silence.

"We'll be there for her birthday," Dean says quietly. "But we're gonna go campin' in the Grand Canyon first. We've been meanin' to go for a while."

The way Dean says "a while" is loaded. John sucks on his teeth. "Dinner's gonna be at five," he says, "Abby wants pulled pork for dinner, so expect your grandparents to show up to get some too."

"Yeah," Dean says, "I'll let Sammy know."

They exchanges meaningless pleasantries; Dean isn't any better at them than he is. Eventually, though, there's another whispered conversation and Dean says, "Gotta go, Dad. Bye," and hangs up on him before he can say his own goodbyes.


End file.
